With PDC in the horizon and the expected cloud announcements by Microsoft,
Amazon just took a giant step forward in positioning its cloud offerings to be
ready for enterprise adaption. Today they made quite a few announcements that is
likely to gain the enterprise attention.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta and it can be deployed in production
level (Aren’t startups doing it already?). They are also offering an SLA which
guarantees a 99.95% availability of their EC2 services. One of the biggest
criticisms of EC2 was the lack of any service level agreements. With this move,
Amazon has once again proved that they listen to their customers. This also
makes Amazon’s EC2 offering complete. When they started off with the barebones
plan, customers badly wanted persistent storage, IP addresses and different
configurations of their instances. They have added all three of them already in
the form of Elastic Block
Storage, Elastic IP Addresses and standard and high
CPU instances.

We reported about Amazon’s Windows based EC2 plans here at Cloud Avenue and, today, Amazon has
announced that Windows EC2 gets beta level support. It is also competitively
priced at $0.125 per hour. With this announcement, Amazon has tried to deflate
any Microsoft’s cloud announcement during PDC. This announcement is very
important because it is now possible to build a heterogeneous server farm
by using Amazon EC2 instances. Apart from different flavors of Linux (RHEL,
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Opensuse, Gentoo and Oracle Enterprise Linux) they
offered from the beginning, they now support Opensolaris and Windows too. They
are offering Windows Server 2003 (both 32 bit and 64 bit) and MS-SQL (64 bit) at
this point. With the possibility to implement Hadoop Mapreduce on Amazon EC2 and S3, any company can have a
highly scalable heterogeneous architecture at a very low cost.

They are also planning to offer Management Console (are they buying
Rightscale?), Load Balancing, Automatic Scaling and Cloud monitoring services in
2009. This is going to be huge and it has the potential to put many companies in
the current AWS ecosystem out of business.

In short, Amazon’s announcements today will force enterprises to have a
second look at the cloud infrastructure. It will definitely lure some medium
level companies to shift their operations to Amazon cloud infrastructure. In
fact, the credibility of Enterprise 2.0 got a boost today and depending on
Microsoft’s announcement at PDC, there is a strong potential to accelerate the
enterprise adaption of cloud computing. Are you convinced about the potential of
cloud computing in the enterprise segment? If you are not, I strongly recommend
you to read this excellent post by Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.